RAYE has blamed “AI bots” and “scalpers” for disrupting a ticket onsale after 1.8 million presale sign-ups were registered for her upcoming show at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
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Writing on Instagram on Tuesday (Oct. 13), the British singer revealed that “hundreds of thousands of fake registrations” were recorded for the one-night-only show slated to take place on Oct. 23 at the iconic 5,000-capacity venue. At the show, RAYE is due to reimagine her hit LP This Music May Contain Hope alongside the Heritage Orchestra.
She wrote: “We received 1.8 million sign-ups for 5000 seats for This Symphony May Contain Hope. Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations.”
RAYE added, “It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale. It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.”
As a result, RAYE said her team had been forced to take extra measures to “manually review” the list to ensure that real fans were part of the resale process. “Therefore rather than risk opening a presale that scalpers could exploit, we felt the best and safest solution for this specific show was to manually review the sign-up list to identify a shortlist of people we believe are real fans,” she said.
Selected fans should have received a presale link and code by email by 11:45 a.m. BST today, with the first sale commencing at midday. Remaining tickets will then go on general sale later this week.
She concluded: “I’m not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes. Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future.”
This Music May Contain Hope is nominated for the Mercury Prize, which will be presented at a ceremony in Newcastle the day before the show (Oct. 22). RAYE is due to perform at the event alongside several other nominated acts including Olivia Dean and Florence + the Machine. The LP charted at No. 1 on the U.K.’s Official Albums Chart and No. 11 on the Billboard 200.
See RAYE’s post below.